Page 66 of Hollow State

Darwin eased back in his chair and glanced at Wynn. She'd been quiet, and that meant only one thing.

She'd been thinking. Wynn was super smart. Well, everyone in this room was intelligent in different ways. Some of the greatest minds Darwin had ever worked with. They all brought something special to the table.

But it scared him when Wynn became this quiet. When that happened, she was processing information and forming her own conclusion.

Her own plan.

And she was usually right on the mark.

"There's one more thing I need to bring up," Gideon said. "I've made headway on the mini-HELIOS devices."

"That's good news," Darwin said.

"As suspected, they talk to an app on a cellphone. Wi-Fi or cellular, and when they can't get either of those, they moves over to telemetry or straight to satellite."

"Can you get into the app?" Coulter asked.

"I don't have to, and honestly, that wouldn't be smart." Gideon pointed to the tablet. "Zadie and I are building our own. Same handshake, our code. Which means we bypass whatever Finch and Pryce were using entirely. We pair a watch and we turn it on ourselves."

Darwin took off his glasses and set them on the table. He'd suggested Finch bring Gideon on to Hyperion. There was no one smarter than Gideon in his field. Turns out, Zadie was as smart. Maybe smarter. But she was software. He was hardware. Together, they were frightening. "Good," he said. "We're going to use one of those watches, and soon."

Gideon's head came up. "Why?"

"Because I'm going to dose myself with VKR-1 and walk into Hyperion."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"No, you're not." Wynn lifted her leg off the chair and put both feet flat on the floor. She winced as the bandage pulled across her thigh but did her best to ignore the throbbing pain.

Darwin leaned back and wiped his glasses on his shirt, a habit that she'd come to adore about the man, but in this moment, it grated on her last nerve. "You need to let me lay out the entire plan."

She sat up tall, pressed her palms against the table, and held his gaze.

"I'm forming an idea of what that mission might look like."

"We need to get inside Hyperion." Darwin put his glasses back on. "We've been hitting ORACLE for months. Every single time, the system chases us out, and what little knowledge we've gained hasn't been enough. We keep waiting for Finch to move so we can react and catch him, but we're always a step behind. We keep doing the same thing expecting different results. It's time to shake it up."

"You're right." Wynn totally agreed. Darwin had hit the tip of a brilliant plan. It needed to be fleshed out. Reworked. And he needed to abandon the idea he was going to do anything other than run mission control and medical.

"I'm what now?" Darwin stared at her with wide eyes.

"You heard me." Wynn's pulse increased like it did every time they had a mission planning meeting. It wasn't because it was exciting. Or that she got off on the anticipated dangers. That would make her no better than her parents. She didn't enjoy near-death experiences. But there was a sort of thrill that she couldn't explain. "We can't win this from down here. Somebody has to get inside that building." She stared at Darwin. "It can't be you, and it certainly can't be you alone."

"I know that building." Darwin leaned forward. "Every corridor. Every lab. I know it better than anyone in this room."

"Except maybe me," Gideon said. "I know the layout physically and digitally. I also know where the two don't match, which is more useful." He closed his laptop. "I could go in with him. Back him up."

Wynn had to agree that Gideon made a good argument. But it wasn't good enough. She got her hand around the cane and stood. Her leg lit up from the knee to the hip, and she took a second to let the pain settle.

"You could," she said. "But that won't work, either."

"Why not?" Darwin asked.

"Nobody alive understands VKR-1 the way you do. What it does going in, what it does coming out, how fast, and what it does to a body that's already tired or hurt." She needed to speak quickly and concisely. She knew that, in theory, what Darwin wanted to do made sense, but only if they came at it from a tactical standpoint. And, in order to get Darwin to see the flaw in his logic, she’d have to approach it from his point of view. "And what's sitting in your lab isn't your compound. It's whatever Emma made of it. You've been telling us for weeks you can't fully break it down. So, even if you get it close to clean, anybody who walks into that building while using it needs you watching their numbers in real time. And you can't watch numbers if you're one of them."

"That's a valid point," Coulter said. "But you're injured. And you're a medic. You could watch."

"Christ," Darwin muttered. "Don't say it."